cgsecurity.org

Hi,

First, thanks for making such a useful software free and saving people from committing suicides.(seriously, cause they always say - this saved my life, ha ha ha ha)

Well, my problem started when, I wanted to create a Bootable Windows USB without formatting existing data as instructed in following tutorial.
http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-make- ... -withoutin addition to search.

Basically, it shows to copy all Win7 installer files to USB and using EasyBCD to make it bootable. All went fine until the last step, when I hit "Yes" in EasyBCD. BAM!!, the disk became unusable. Windows was still detecting the usb drive but the drive properties shows "USED space 0" "FREE space 0", file system "RAW".

I knew the data wasn't deleted. Luckily found Testdisk (src youtube). Ran it and there it is recovering those lost files. Wonderful.

However, can anybody advice on a "safe" way to bring the drive back to the stage it intially was as EastBCD may have just overwritten the boot-sector (or it's not that simple)? Anybuddy ?

Currently, TD is recovering the data (Estimated time: 30hrs). The problem is it's dumping files into one dir's without preserving original dir's structure.

My data files (12 gb) are mostly excel (xlsx) & mp3's and some pdf's, docs etd. Data was carefully manually organized under multiple folder's with many levels of hierarchy. Dir's name and position in hierarchy identified file's data, therefore folder hierarchy and name is critical otherwise it's another huge problem to arrange it back in the order it was.

Is there a way to preserve or at-least get file's parent dir's order/list and their resp. names.

Can TD detect dir's and do a search inside directory only in addition to file type search. The directory structure was something like:

ALL_data_dir (contains sub-dir's and data files within them)
(WIN7 installer dir's & files below)
boot
efi
sources
support
upgrade
autorun.inf
bootmgr
setup.exe

If I run TD with option to search for exe's, xlsx, pdf's, docs etc then it will search within each WIN7 dir's as well as "ALL_data" dir. Obvisously Win7 installer dir's will be having huge no. of above file types which significantly increase search times, not to mention the huge amount of time to identify and sort installer files separate from imp. data files in recovered files. Is there a way to overcome this problem?

I prefer GUI's (more options and easier interface). Can you tell which GUI packages use Testdisk as their core engine.

I am on Win 7 (32bit).
USB- initial file system: FAT32
Imp data is around 8GB on 16bg sandisk usb drive.

SUGGESTIONS:
1. Report xlsx as XLSX: TD reports XLSX ext's as ZIP's.(xlsx basically are archives). Perhaps you may want to change this.
2. Include an option to shutdown windows at the end of searching cause it takes hours to search the entire disk and these days they don't make small capacity disks.

Hope anybuddy can help here. Main concern is sorting useful data from win7 files and identifying directory structure.

thanks
dkja

photorec doesn't recover the file structure. Use testdisk instead
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

Hi Chris,

I am actually running PhotoRec, sorry for that. Although no one can be certain, but given your experience, do you really think running TD will help me get the USB to pre bootable disk creation stage.

thanks
dkja

Hi,

I stopped photorec and ran testdisk. Here are the screenshots and testdisk.log after drive analysis. This is all greek to me. Pls advice on what to do next:

Can anybody help me out....Please this is very essentially truly urgent. Please advice.